Tyler Hunt

As with most blogs and sites on the Internet, this one has gone through several iterations, and tends to get refreshed on a somewhat annual basis, but this time around I’m taking an entirely new approach to the refresh.

Inhabitat posted a piece this morning on a clever collocation of graffiti and home decor. Ryan Frank’s Hackney Shelf has has loft appeal with an urban edge.

The Hackney Shelf presents a blank canvas to the open public. White boards are displayed at various points around East London attracting a variety of illicit city activities.

Once the boards have “matured”, they are removed and transformed into contemporary shelving units, juxtaposing street art with the interior environment.

I really enjoy doing graphic design. Actually, I think what I enjoy more than the design itself is seeing a project through to completion. There’s something nice about being able to hold a box full of copies in your hand. It’s a feeling that you don’t get from doing web design, where there’s no physical produce of your labors.

Robin asked me to take care of getting the handouts for H2O’s Compassion Weekend printed. It wasn’t the ideal situation, and everything was left until the last minute, but it turned out all right. It would have been nice to have had the full resolution version of the logo for the front instead of a JPEG, but I’m not sure how much better the higher quality version would have looked. There’s only so much you can do with color laser. Robin sent me the back side in Word format, and I figured it wouldn’t reduce very well down to a quarter page so I recreated it in Illustrator. It was a fun little project that ended up being a bit stressful due to the unsurety of pastoral approval. Everything worked out in the end, and while it didn’t quite meet my standards, they seemed happy enough with the final product. There’s only so much you can do in certain situations before you just have to make due with what you have to work with and hope for the best.

It’s short for Funky Furniture and Design, or “Funky. Furniture. And. Design.” This period-after-every-word style on the subheadings is one of the things that makes Funfurde such a cool little blog. Each entry serves as a mini-review of some item from the world of modern furniture and accessories. There’s all sorts of odd-looking, overpriced eye candy to drool over or scoff at.

Every since I first learned about how colors mix together to form other colors, I’ve been fascinated by color. It’s always interesting to see how different colors have different meanings that can be tied to feeling, emotions, personalities, nationalities, and a slew of other criteria. Mark passed along a link to a thesis project for a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology called Color in Motion. It’s a series of Flash movies and interactive segments on the symbolism of color, and it manages to be entertaining, educational, and empowering at once.

After trying to get the new framework-based blog software finished up for the last couple weeks, and making relatively little progress, I decided set up John Hever’s blog with Movable Type. I had originally decided that I would either use my own software, or wait until the new 3.0 version of Movable Type came out, and since 3.0 is now out, I spent the day today putting together a decent template for his blog. He was looking for something that would go well with the H2O web site, so I played around in Photoshop today until I came up with the design you see below. The site isn’t public yet, but should be soon.

As I read some of the higher profile blogs on the Internet (such as Preacher’s), I am often a bit jealous of their popularity. I’ve had a desire for as long as I can remember to create something to be seen by the world, as I alluded to once before. Maybe this is just an indication that my creativity is being stifled in some way. Many times when I get the urge do make something new, I get frustrated and give up because I feel like I’m merely copying someone else in one way or another. But how many people actually create something that’s truly unique? Aren’t most works derivatives to a certain degree? And if not a straight a derivative, then it’s at least likely that there was some other piece that provided inspiration for the new one.

Maybe I need to get into art again. Or music, as Sarah was suggesting to me tonight. I’ve always wanted to be able to create music of some kind. Maybe that’s just a natural extension of enjoying listening to it so much. Maybe there’s something more to it that I’m subconsciously suppressing. While I tried piano for several years of my life, and guitar for a time as well, I never really enjoyed either instrument. Maybe it was just the fact that I had friends who picked it up quickly and naturally, whereas I felt like I was trying to force something that I didn’t have in the first place.

So, I’ve taken to coding as my creative outlet. It’s fulfilling to a degree, and I enjoy it more than I did piano, but it’s harder to be appreciated as a programmer. For the most part it’s a secret art, hidden away behind fancy user interfaces and front-ends. And I think that’s one reason why I like being a web developer so much. The results are more visible, and immediately available to the world. Daniel has told me that he can be a content coder churning out the back-end, but he knows that I’m a GUI guy at heart. As much as the code itself is art, it’s the canvas of the screen is where my work really shines.

As part of an effort to start moving towards more freelance work, I began working on a design for personal business cards today. I’ve never done much serious print work. When I worked on business cards and letterhead at work, I mostly used CorelDRAW since it was available and it was the format used for most of the original graphics. But after hearing such good things about Adobe Illustrator from Mark, I thought I would give that a try, thinking my Photoshop knowledge would carry over to Illustrator more than it actually did. Despite the sometimes quirky differences between the two programs, there are a lot of similarities, and it didn’t take too long to start picking up on the way things work. I had a lot of fun working on those business cards today, and it has given me the urge to start doing all kinds of print projects now.

The Coolest Chicken has a brand new design as of today. Erin has been getting on to me for a while now to get something up to replace the boring old default. What’s there now I consider to be merely an intermediate state. It’s a good transition away from the default, but it could use some spiffing up still.

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve done anything with the layout or design here, but I was feeling like it was about the right time to get away from the default every-so-slightly modified Movable Type theme and come up with something original. I wasn’t sure which direction I was going to take with this design, as is usually the case when I work on new projects. My method goes something like this: open Photoshop, pick some nice colors, make boxes for content, and then maybe find a photo or some graphical element to tie it all together. Only lately my choice of color has mostly been blue or blue (this blog being an unusually green exception), so I tweaked the process a little and started with a photo this time. I went through a few the had potential, but it was this third one that caught my eye. As soon as I saw it I knew right where it was going on the page. It fits in that spot perfectly, and red and gray is a classic scheme that I’ve been wanting to work with for some time now.

The hard part was getting it all tied into Movable Type’s spaghetti code of HTML and CSS and MT tags. While it all works together somehow, Movable Type can hardly be called an elegant system. During the conversion I also turned everything into PHP files which should allow for more future flexibility, but I also ran into some snags with getting everything to work together nicely. I persevered and came up with a solution that worked, even if it felt as dirty as the original on the underside. Hopefully the new look will go over well. And the new name as well. While the old one may have looked more impressive, the unoriginality of it always bothered me. And while the new name isn’t exactly original, at least it’s my own, and I think I’ll stick with it for a bit.

I got a book on web usability for Christmas this year, and after reading most of it today on the plane flight back from New Jersey, I feel like it has made me a better web developer. While a lot of the information in the book should be common sense for most developers, there were some good bits of information, particularly about usability testing, that made it a worthwhile read. It has also inspired me to start up work on some projects that I have already begun, and now that I have a short break from school, I will actually have some time to devote to such an endeavor.

My frustrations over Flash are quickly fading. I spent some quality time with the program and its online documentation today, and discovered that ActionScript isn’t nearly as daunting as some would make it out to be. It’s basically JavaScript applied to vector graphics. As powerful as Flash can be without scripting, a little bit of knowledge about AS opens up so many new possibilities. While most every effect you see done in Flash these days could be easily (if tediously) recreated using only the drawing tools and the timeline, AS make it all miraculously easy. This stuff is really getting fun now.

Once again I have delved into the world of Flash. I usually pick up on new programs and languages fairly quickly on my own, but my history with Flash hasn’t been without it’s struggles. Since about version 4 I’ve given Flash a couple good attempts, but nothing really clicked, and I always felt like there was some major piece I was missing out on. In many ways, I’m still in that position, but Kirby has inspired me to dig a little deeper and persevere until the beast is tamed. It’s not that it’s all that hard, there are just so many wrong ways to do things that it frustrates my perfectionistic instincts. And that’s what I think is really at the root of all this. At any rate, look for some new and exciting multimedia and interactive elements soon.

It’s been two years now since I got my first camera, the Canon S110. And while 2.0 megapixel still isn’t quite outdated, it’s definitely on its way out. Compound that with the wear and tear that two years of use has taken on the camera, and it’s arguably about time to start looking for its replacement. I’ve had my eye on the Canon S400 for a while now. Basically the same form factor, with a 4.0 megapixel sensor and a slightly better optical zoom. But, while the S400 is much faster than my current camera, it still doesn’t offer a lot of the manual settings that I was hoping to have.

Here’s where my dilemma begins. I have been very happy with the small size and ease of use of the S110. It’s a great camera to have if you want one that you can always carry with you. At the same time however, I often feel limited by what it can do. There have been times, for example, where I wanted to take a great shot at night, but just wasn’t able to because of a lack of exposure and shutter speed settings. Or saw a great macro shot, but just couldn’t get the camera to focus that close. So I’m considering taking the next step in my photographic journey and getting some type of SLR. While a film SLR wouldn’t set me back too much more than a high-end consumer digital, a digital SLR would be a significant investment that I’m still not sure I’m willing to make.

The spread of sites with customizable user interfaces has brought about a bit of a dilemma: do we let users choose their own look for the site, or go with our own creative judgement and force them to view the site a single way. Well Lockergnome has opted for the customizable route and has done a really slick job of it, as well. There are three color schemes (Atlantic Blue, Bitter Mango, and Sonic Orange) and the ability to switch the navigation bar between the right and left sides of the page. Overall this looks to be a very polished site that can be praised for their standards compliance.